"There are two alternatives. Either the walk and the falsehood are to be explained by some petty, innocent motive, a visit of charity or a chance meeting, and they have not spoken to me about it owing to a false dread of displeasing me; or else, the walk and the falsehood indicate that there is a mystery between Helen and Armand. Let us speak out and say that they love each other. There is no means of avoiding the alternative. In the first case, I should have to scold Helen for believing me to be so childishly jealous; in the second--" Here his imagination paused, being taken unawares. There was within him no anticipatory prevision of a misfortune of the kind. The practical rules, received and accepted in his youth, upon which his whole life was based, did not afford an answer to this cruel hypothesis. On the other hand, he had for the determining of his will neither that dread of public opinion which serves to guide nearly all husbands in similar crises, nor the startling physical vision, that besetting, unendurable vision which maddens a jealous man by showing him sexual union, fleshly abandonment, irredeemable pollution. The fact that Helen and Armand loved each other did not for a moment signify to Chazel that she was the young man's mistress. It signified that she had given him her heart. But then what was his duty as her husband? For lack of previously adopted principles, he suffered himself to be led away by the mania for absolute, ideal theories that is characteristic of mathematicians. "My duty, if I am becoming an obstacle to her happiness, is to sacrifice myself. She must be left free; all must be given up." He thought immediately of his son; he could see the little gestures, the pretty face, the bright eyes of the child whom he had already moulded in his own likeness. "Ah!" he said to himself, "I have no right to forsake him. But to take him with me--to deprive his mother of him?" The tragic nature of this possibility disconcerted his intellect afresh, and like a timorous swimmer who has ventured a few fathoms too far, he speedily returned to the place where he could keep his footing, where his reasoning stood firm close to the facts. "I am losing my head," he groaned. "The question is, does she love him? Does she not love him?" He had risen once more, and was walking with a more hurried step than before. "How can I find out? How? how?" he asked himself, and the emotion of uncertainty became so insupportable to him that he said to himself: "Let there be an end of it. I will come to an understanding with Helen--and at once."